ABSTRACT
Many years ago, in the mid-1960s, I was invited to teach for a while in Ghana, West Africa, at the School of Architecture, Kumasi University of Science and Technology. Kumasi is in the heart of the Ghanaian rain forest, and we arrived in the middle of the rainy season. All the vegetation was green and glistening. I was fascinated by this jungle environment, and by the Asante villages that were buried deep in it, often linked only by unmade tracks of compacted red earth. Exploring the forest to some extent, I was impressed by the range of ‘woody plants’, as foresters termed them, from luxuriating palm trees, to giant cottonwoods with exposed root systems like immense buttresses. There was dense undergrowth throughout, which seemed impenetrable. Wanting to know more, I spoke to an agronomist at the university about it. ‘It’s not a jungle’, he said, when I used the word; ‘it’s not even rain forest in the sense that you would find it in Nigeria or the Ivory Coast’.
